Work Text:
“Uh-oh. Tango’s on the war path. Come on, Bdubs.”
Tango stormed past them, not really processing Impulse’s words. He smacked the head of his wrench into the palm of his opposite hand.
He felt a broad, warm hand through the fabric of his jumpsuit. “Tango,” Impulse said. “What’s wrong?”
“This is the seventh meltdown-level overload this month,” Tango grumbled back. “I don’t know what’s going on with the engine but I have to figure it out.” He struck the engine’s emergency shutdown with the side of his fist.
The constant thrumming of the ship went quiet. The lights went out except for the emergency backups. The backup generators powered on for life support.
Tango’s radio crackled. “What’s going on, Tango?” the captain’s voice asked.
“Engine was about ready to melt down again, Etho,” Tango replied. “I had to shut it off.”
The long silent pause gave away that Etho was definitely heaving a sigh on the other end before replying. “Do what you have to do. I trust you.”
The PA system pinged throughout the ship. “Attention, attention. The ship’s engines are going to be powered down for an unknown amount of time due to a known overload issue. The engineering crew is going to look into the problem and get the engines back online as soon as they can. Thank you for your patience,” Etho’s voice echoed around the ship.
Tango batted Impulse’s hand off his shoulder. “Mind the engine temperature,” he said. “I’m going in.”
“Tango—” Impulse tried to protest, grabbing Tango by the elbow. “You know how dangerous that is!”
“Which is why I’m putting on a radiation suit,” Tango retorted, yanking his arm out of Impulse’s grip, already pulling one of the shortest sizes off the rack. He stepped into it and wrangled it up over his jumpsuit before putting on the domed helmet. “Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.” He looked between Impulse and Bdubs. “Your boyfriend isn’t even supposed to be down here. He’s not authorized to access the engine area. If something stupid happens to me, you’ll get in trouble if he’s caught down here too.”
Bdubs and Impulse were, as far as Tango knew, not actually boyfriends. They just hung out together enough that calling them boyfriends had become the joke on the engineering crew. Bdubs used to cling to Etho like particularly stubborn barnacles on the hull of a sailing ship, but once Etho became the captain, he’d become so busy that Bdubs had to find new people to spend time with. Which usually involved him showing up in the engineering bay to pester Impulse. Something Tango knew he wasn’t supposed to allow as the chief engineer but did anyway. Because Impulse and Bdubs were both friends of his and he knew he could trust Impulse to keep Bdubs’ grubby hands away from his engine.
Tango stepped into the radiation airlock and waited for it to seal so he could get into the engine’s core itself. He needed to get in there to see what was going on. What was wrong. Why the engine kept overloading the point of nearly melting down. Tango really didn’t like not knowing what was wrong with his engine. He prided himself on being one of the best engineers in the entire space program. He was supposed to know his engine back to front. He was supposed to know everything about it. But for some reason, he hadn’t been able to figure out why she kept overloading and overheating.
The next door opened, letting him into the engine. He took a deep breath. He didn’t like stepping into the engine. But he had to do it. He had to figure out what was wrong with her. The engine was dangerous but it was also just tricky to navigate in a radiation suit. They were about as bulky and hard to move in as spacewalk exosuits the scientists wore and engineering wore when doing external repairs. Which, thankfully, also wasn’t often.
Tango wove between large parts of the engine, the lights on his shoulders illuminating his way. The engine wasn’t moving, considering it was powered down and the lights were off.
He could vaguely hear the heavy boots of his suit thumping on the metal grate through his helmet, but the microphones in the suit transmitting to his helmet weren’t focused on his feet. They were meant to listen to the engine itself.
Tango climbed off a walkway and between two huge parts of the engine, going deeper than Etho would probably consider “sanctioned” or “safe.” But Tango had to figure out the problem.
Which meant he had to be thorough.
Starting from the very center. The core of the engine. The place he’d been advised by his original mentor to never, ever, EVER get close to, given it was dangerous.
He approached it slowly, listening for danger. Listening for anything that would make him flee with extra flee back to the airlock.
But the engine remained silent and dark.
Except…
Tango scrunched his eyebrows.
Was that light? Up ahead?
What would be lit in the center of the engine when the whole ship was in emergency shutdown?
He moved a little faster, ducking under a tube that usually piped coolant around the engine. He hated how cumbersome these suits were. He was so much more nimble in just his jumpsuit, bouncing around the non-radioactive parts of the engine that weren’t shielded like a little flea.
He wove through several more chunks of metal, following that light. Where it had been faint at first, it was growing brighter as Tango got closer.
He knew the center of the engine was where the power converter was, where the fuel was turned into energy. Why would it be glowing when the engine was shut down? It shouldn’t be doing any sort of conversions at the moment.
He rounded one last chunk of machinery, the light now bright enough that he didn’t really need his shoulder flashlights.
Tango stopped dead in his tracks. His breath caught in his throat and his mouth fell open in surprise.
“What the f…” He was so startled he didn’t even finish his swear.
He recognized the shape of the pod. But stasis chambers were relics. Part of a long-since bygone age before Faster Than Light travel had been discovered.
And this one was occupied. In the middle of his engine.
The figure floating in the bluish fluid was masculine in frame. Broad shoulders. No shirt exposing sculpted pecs, abdominal muscles, and deltoids. Wearing nothing but a pair of thick, white, skintight shorts. Long, strong-looking legs drifted slightly back and forth in the water. The figure was dirty blond—probably, the blue tone to the stasis fluid made it difficult to tell for certain—with closed eyes. Thick, dark, long eyelashes brushed the tops of cheekbones. The figure was wearing a breathing mask, sealed around the lower half of his face.
Tango’s brows lowered. He circled the stasis chamber.
“Oh my… God,” he said softly.
The figure had a pair of enormous, golden wings on his back. They seemed to glimmer with subtle light, not just reflecting the bulb at the top of the stasis chamber shining in on the figure and sending the fluid’s lines dancing over skin and feathers.
Tango went back around to the front in a panic, hand on the glass of the chamber to keep him from veering off-course. He looked up at the stasis figure.
Tall, for sure. Definitely taller than Tango if they were both standing up on a level surface.
A meter on the base of the stasis chamber caught Tango’s attention. He knelt and peered at it. A bit old-school.
Power Output read the label over the meter.
The needle was currently wavering between orange and red. The red being labeled Overload: Reduce Output and the orange being labeled Dangerous/Still Functional.
Tango looked around the chamber. The back, up top where the “lid” was, he caught sight of a wheel. Almost like a pressure release valve.
Getting up there, especially in this suit, was… either impossible or was going to be a complete pain.
But he had to at least try.
He set down one of the remote monitoring cameras the suit was equipped with to keep an eye on the meter before circling the back of the chamber to figure out how to get up there.
He had no idea how long it took. The lack of a ladder or anything similar was not helpful. He tried and failed to shimmy up the sleek glass tube of the chamber, only to slide back down over and over, no position of the rubber soles of his boots doing anything to give him purchase.
Finally, he gave up on scaling the chamber itself and climbed a nearby piece of the engine before jumping over and landing clumsily against the top of the pod. He managed to grab hold of the wheel, twisting it. Something somewhere hissed.
Projected onto the glass inside the domed helmet was the video feed from the camera.
The Power Output needle had dipped. Now holding in the yellow zone. Higher Than Preferred. So, Tango twisted the wheel again. More hissing. The needle dipped again. Green zone. Optimal.
Tango climbed down from the lid of the pod rather gracelessly, almost falling to the floor.
He scooped up the camera and tucked it away, turning it off.
Then stared. For several long minutes.
Power Output? What? And where were the fuel cells? Those were supposed to be around here somewhere, weren’t they? In the middle of the engine? Why was there a person—with wings, no less—in a stasis pod in the center of the—
Tango’s stomach dropped through the floor.
He turned on the ball of his foot and bolted through the engine as fast as he possibly could, making his way back to the airlock. He hopped impatiently from foot to foot as he waited for the decontamination to complete so he could get out of the suit.
Once he heard beeping and the next door unlocked, he removed his helmet and started shoving the suit off.
“Did you figure it out?” Impulse asked pleasantly. Bdubs was nowhere to be seen, so he’d obviously taken Tango’s advice to get out of the engine bay in case something bad happened to Tango and they got in trouble for hanging out.
Tango grunted. A complete non-answer. He left the radiation suit on the floor next to the racks and took off running before Impulse could so much as cry out after him in surprise and protest.
Tango took the stairs two at a time. The elevators that usually operated between levels were powered down with the engine shutoff. He distantly had a single braincell to spare hoping that he hadn’t accidentally stranded any of his crewmates in the elevators for the last twenty minutes or however long this shutdown was lasting.
He manually shoved open the automatic door to the bridge. “Captain!” he barked, marching up to Etho, who was standing near the front window.
Etho turned, lowering a hand from where he’d been pinching his chin in thought. “Lieutenant,” he greeted pleasantly.
“Can I have a word?”
“Of course, Tango.”
“In private?” Tango pressed.
“About what?” Skizz asked. Forever nosy. Though as the captain’s second-in-command, being nosy was often his job.
Tango didn’t take his eyes off Etho. “Fuel,” he spat. The furious vitriol in his tone made Etho’s gaze snap right to him from where it had drifted over to Skizz.
“Come with me,” Etho said. He led Tango off the bridge and through several corridors until they made it to his office. They yanked the door open and shut manually and Etho flicked on a battery-powered lamp on the desk for some soft light. “What’s going on, Tango?”
“Do you want to explain to me why the hell there’s a person in a stasis chamber in the center of the engine instead of fuel cells?” Tango demanded. “With wings no less?”
Tango waited for the denial. For Etho to reply that he had no idea what Tango was talking about. That the news was news to him. A total surprise.
But Etho sighed, his shoulders slumping. He was a good deal taller than Tango. “You went into the engine,” he said.
“I had to! Seven overloads in a month, that were about to cause the engine to melt? What else was I supposed to do?! Just not go into the engine and potentially turn us all into nothing more than space debris? This is my job, Etho!” Tango flung a hand.
Etho pinched the bridge of his nose. “I get that.”
“So?” Tango challenged.
“So, what?”
“So what the hell is a person with wings doing in a stasis chamber in the middle of the engine?”
“What do you think?” Etho shot back. “He’s powering the ship!”
Tango took a step back, the heel of his boot brushing the door or the wall. “What?” he breathed. He got his voice back, tilting forward with his brows lowering in a glower. “What do you mean, he’s powering the ship?”
“Tango… that entity isn’t a human. He’s not a man.”
“So what the hell is he, then?”
Etho inhaled and released a long sigh. “Technically, he’s an Avian-Humanoid extra-terrestrial.”
“A bird-person alien.”
“Yes. But he’s considered a god on his planet. He has so much energy. He’s been fuelling this ship for almost this ship’s entire lifespan so far.”
Tango ran a quick calculation. The Solar Wave had been operational since before he joined her crew.
“You mean to tell me…” Tango began, feeling his temper build. “That you have kept a sapient, intelligent being captive for fifteen years to act as a living battery?!”
“He went into the pod willingly, Tango!” Etho retorted.
“Did he, now?” Tango challenged.
“Yes! He wasn’t a crew member. He was a passenger. We were fleeing his planet with him on board as a refugee and our fuel cells ruptured. We were going to be stranded. He volunteered to power the ship.”
“For fifteen years?”
“What is fifteen years to an immortal god?”
“Etho, volunteer or not, this has to have gone on long enough.”
“We’ve repaired the ship around the pod too many times. It can’t function without him, now.”
“You have to realize this is wrong!” Tango pleaded, desperation in his voice. “There has to be some way to reimplement the fuel cells!”
“I’m sorry. The systems won’t function any other way. He’ll be in the pod until the Solar Wave is decomissioned and retired.” Etho patted the wall. “But she’s got a few good years left in her. And then she’ll be retired and we can dismantle the engine. And he’ll be free.”
Tango took several deep breaths. “Right,” he said.
“Look, Tango. I know it’s hard to accept. But it… this is just how it has to be right now.”
Tango looked away. “Regardless. I recommend docking at the nearest space station so the rest of the engineering crew and I can fix the engine. I turned down the power output from the pod but that strikes me as a temporary solution.” He pretended to count on his fingers. “Our battery is too big, Captain. The engine’s been overclocked. Too much energy.”
“Recommendation noted,” Etho said.
“So I turn the engine back on and we make our way to the nearest space station?”
“Nooo. We have a mission to complete, Tango.”
Tango’s hand pounded the desk with the side of his fist. “Captain! If we don’t get the engine properly sorted, we all become space dust! Do you want your entire crew to die?”
“Lieutenant—”
“No, you’re going to listen to me. The captain has to heed the orders of his doctor regarding his own health, and the captain has to heed his engineer regarding the continued existence of everyone on board. Our ship has had seven meltdown-level overloads in one month. She’s overclocked. She’s dangerously close to blowing up if we don’t get her fixed. And I can’t do that when we’re flying through the sky. I need her powered down and resting. I need the crew to be safely away from her. I need extra tools I don’t have here. The kind of maintenance tools that space stations and planets keep on hand, but can’t be stored on a ship. Captain, even before I knew about the god in stasis, I was going to tell you that we need to dock on a planet or a space station. I know it’s going to delay our mission but it’s better to be delayed than dead!”
Etho narrowed his eyes at Tango, body tensing. “Do you know how much paperwork I’m going to have to do if we’re delayed?”
“Do you know how much paperwork the guild will have to do if we all die?” Tango shot back without missing a beat.
“Fine. We dock at the nearest space station or planet that can accommodate us. And you get to explain to the guild why we’re going to be delayed.”
Tango bowed dramatically. “With pleasure, Captain,” he said, sarcasm easily evident as to almost overflow. He spun back toward the door. “I can explain it a damn sight better than you can.” He yanked the office door open. “I’ll power her back on right away.” That last sentence he threw over his shoulder as he headed for the stairs. Once he was out of Etho’s earshot, he started muttering under his breath. “Man started out in engineering himself and was one of the best and he can’t even see that his own ship is going to blow up? The hell’s up with that?”
—
Tango was half-sitting, half-laying on his bed in his cabin, knees up to brace his tablet against, the non-tipped end of its stylus loosely in his mouth. He had his clean, off-hours rotation jumpsuit on, but the top half was hanging loose with the sleeves tied around his waist, leaving him in the tank top he wore underneath it. He was partially propped up by his pillow. One of his hands was fiddling with his dog tags, the other scrolling on his tablet. Outside, the FTL bubble streamed with light through his viewport.
He didn’t pay it much attention, focused instead on his device.
If he was honest with himself, he doubted he’d find anything that he was actually looking for and was trying to brace himself to be okay with it. Most of his mind doubted that the archived footage was even kept that long.
He scrolled through fifteen years worth of logs and footage. He’d done a little more research and an old blueprint of the ship’s engine configuration as it had been originally showed that a security camera used to be near the engine’s fuel cells. Where the stasis chamber now was. The camera was long-since gone, but Tango wondered if it had still been there when the extra-terrestrial god had been placed in the stasis chamber.
Etho had mentioned fleeing the god’s original planet in a hurry, and a quick scan of the Solar Wave’s service history in the whole guild’s archive had showed a handful of logs of them leaving somewhere in a hurry over the course of the ship’s time in the sky. But only one far enough back to potentially be the god’s planet.
A planet that humans had called Bia after an Ancient Greek goddess Tango was unfamiliar with. The name the inhabitants of the planet called their own world looked a keysmash Tango didn’t dare trying to pronounce.
Tango found the stardates that the log of leaving Bia had been around in the security footage archive. He was in the engine bay subfolder and just started opening files and skimming through. He found the exact camera he was looking for. Camera 124-B. He started pulling up the files of just that camera alone. Every single one that started with images of the fuel cells, he skipped. If he found one that started with the stasis chamber, he’d go back to the one before it.
He got to a stardate where Camera 124-B was no longer listed. So he went to the last available video from that camera.
He skimmed through the video. And saw engineers he didn’t know occasionally pass in and out of the camera frame in radiation suits. Carrying curved glass panes or metal parts. Tension began to firm up Tango’s spine. He sat up on his bed better, fast-forwarding through the video even more. He watched the engineers dismantle the fuel cells—one of them was, indeed, ruptured, though the rest appeared to be relatively intact.
The end of the video’s scrubbable timeline was the very top of the stasis pod barely wheeling into frame.
Video Footage Corrupted
Tango stared at that error, barely managing to contain the rage and frustration that swept him. “What are you hiding, Etho?” he growled.
He’d kind of expected it. Etho had said the god went into the pod willingly. But Tango wasn’t stupid enough to believe that at face value. Hence he was searching the old archived security footage to verify. And seeing that the footage corrupted didn’t surprise him as much as he thought it would have.
He chewed the inside of his cheek, deep in thought.
He slung himself off his bed and untied the sleeves of his jumpsuit from his waist, pulling the top half of his jumpsuit on properly. He tucked his dog tag down the collar of it, shutdown everything on his tablet after deleting its history, and left it on his bed. He paused at the door. “Computer, locate Doctor Fan,” he said.
“Locating Doctor Fan, Cub…” the cool, calm female voice of the computer said. A few dots pulsed on screen. “Doctor Fan located. Observation deck. Current rotation: on-duty.”
Tango left his cabin and headed for the observation deck.
He took the stairs. The observation deck was only a couple decks higher than his cabin.
The observation deck was empty apart from one scientist in a lab coat, typing at his tablet with his stylus.
Tango slid inside and shut the door. “Cub?” he asked.
Cub turned around. “Hey Tango. What’s up, man?”
“You’ve been employed on the Solar Wave for her entire lifespan, right?”
“Yeah…? Why?”
Tango picked at his nails. “What do you know about the engine?”
“Not as much as you do, I’m sure,” Cub remarked. “I’m an astrophysicist, not an engineer.”
“What do you know about how the ship is powered?”
A flicker of a muscle in Cub’s forehead, mostly hidden by his black bangs, answered Tango’s question. “I mean,” Cub said, “it’s a nuclear reactor.”
“You’re lying.”
Cub glanced around. The observation deck’s nature of being essentially a glass dome on the top of the ship, the vastness of space sprawling out in literally every direction, made it difficult for the dome to have a security camera within it. One of the safest places to have a truly private conversation besides the offices.
“You’re talking about the stasis chamber,” Cub said.
Tango could have fallen over from relief. “Yes. What do you know about it?”
“He’s a god of Bia. Their world and culture refer to him as a god, anyway. Something about the way life developed on Bia… I’m not a biologist, Tango. I’m not the greatest to explain this. It’s not my specialty. I know a little bit, but not a lot. The life on Bia developed with an ability to absorb and expel energy directly. A lot of life on Bia doesn’t eat. They all sort of photosynthesize, in a way. Getting their energy directly from their star. The culture of Bia’s intelligent life has a social structure of energy. And the one in the pod was an extremely rare type. He absorbed a lot of energy and was able to store it without burning himself up, expelling it whenever as he saw fit. He could absorb and store energy in such a way as to make him immortal. They considered him a god.”
“And he’s still powering the ship,” Tango said.
Cub nodded. “Yeah. He absorbed the energy of the nuclear reactor and the fuel cells, and is still using it to power the ship. Sometimes it works like a loop of recycling. He takes the excess energy in from the ship that he expelled to fuel it, and just puts it back out, ready to use again.”
Tango took a deep breath and thought, for several long moments, picking at his nails. “Etho said he went into the pod willingly.”
Cub blinked. His expression was impassive.
“I want to believe him,” Tango continued. “But I don’t.”
Cub tapped at his tablet for a bit and scrolled. He said nothing and Tango didn’t interrupt.
After a few minutes, Cub pushed his tablet into Tango’s hands.
A video.
Tango pressed Play.
The stasis chamber was wheeled into frame and slotted into place. Right where it remained to this day. Tango watched as those engineers he didn’t know bolted it down and started attaching tubes and wires to it. He skipped forward a few minutes at Cub’s direction, stopping when Cub told him to and letting the video play.
Members of the security team dragged the Avian-Humanoid into frame. His wings were bound and he was struggling. Energy pulsed off of him, making the air ripple, but the security team had him clamped to themselves.
“No! No, please! Stop! Don’t do this, please!” the man said as he was dragged inexorably closer to the pod. The glass at the front opened. He was pushed into it. He tried clinging to the edges to pull himself back out, but his fingers were hit, one by one, to get him to let go. The panel closed around him. The fluid began filling up the chamber as a gas came in through the pipe at the top.
He wavered where he stood and went limp. Sedated by the gas. The fluid lifted him to be upright again. One of the engineers dunked their hands into fluid and unbound his wings. They put the breathing mask over his face.
“Why do you have this video?” Tango breathed.
“I knew command was going to try to get rid of it. So I kept it.”
Tango swallowed down his fury. “He’s being held captive. As a battery.” He looked up at Cub. “Why haven’t you done anything? If you’ve known?”
“I already told you. I’m an astrophysicist. I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not a biologist. I’m not an engineer. My specialty doesn’t let me do anything to help him. I can’t change the ship to accept fuel cells again. I can’t handle whatever’s been done to him by being in stasis for fifteen years. I wouldn’t even know how to get him out of the pod if I tried. It’s not my area of expertise. I’m on the Solar Wave to study the stars.”
“This is so unethical,” Tango whispered.
“I agree.”
“And Etho allowed this to happen?”
Cub sucked in a sharp breath. “You know what he’s like, man,” he said softly. “It was a practical solution in a tricky situation. And he… he focuses on solutions.”
Tango huffed out a breath, shaking his head and shoving Cub’s tablet back into his hands. “I… This is insane. All of it. We shouldn’t… I need to…” He stumbled a few steps back. Cub reached out with his free hand and caught Tango’s shoulder, stabilizing his wobbly balance.
“I know, Tango. But we can’t do anything until the Solar Wave is decomissioned and retired.”
Tango’s eyes flashed up to Cub’s. “I refuse to believe that,” he said.
Pivoting on the ball of his foot, he took off running out of the dome.
—
The rest of the crew was taking a few days of shore leave on the Rising Dawn space station. Enjoying the natural light of the closest star—a yellow, main-sequence star only slightly smaller than Sol, the Earth’s sun—and the features of the space station. Swimming, nicer food, a bigger array of games than most starships could hold.
Tango had snuck back onboard when no one else was there, not even the space station employees. It was the middle of the night.
He was definitely about to do something stupid.
He wriggled into the radiation suit and delved into the engine. The path back to the stasis chamber was burned into his mind permanently, and he made he way back to it faster than he’d found it the first time.
And just how are you going to accomplish this without getting caught? The rational part of his mind whispered.
But he’d spent the week between finding out about how the god was unlawfully imprisoned and now disabling the failsafes and the alarms meant to keep the god in the stasis chamber. Whenever no one was looking at him. He was exhausted, having gone almost the whole week with barely any sleep. But he had to do this.
He made it back to the chamber and inspected it.
The way he figured it, he had two options. Shatter the glass and let the poor guy fall out, or figure out how to properly drain the fluid.
He chose the latter.
He tinkered around for a few minutes before finding the release in the compartment under the tank.
With a guttering sound, the fluid started to drain.
Tango climbed up the engine and leapt onto the top of the pod. He turned off the tube that was pumping the stasis gas into the pod and climbed clumsily back down. The bulky radiation suit wasn’t exactly made for nimble movement.
He waited impatiently for the fluid to drain and the stasis gas to dissipate. The god in the chamber slowly slumped against the glass wall of the back of the pod, his body pressing against his wings.
Once the fluid was gone, Tango opened the front panel of the chamber. He climbed up in and pulled the god’s arm over his shoulders to pull him out. The god’s bare feet flopped limply onto the floor, still wet from the fluid.
Tango pulled the breathing mask off and threw it back into the chamber. The god’s feathers and hair and skin dripped stasis fluid onto the floor.
Fluid-logged, winged, and at least six inches taller than Tango with strangely-not-atrophied muscles, the god was heavy as Tango did his best to support his weight through the engine. “Come on, buddy. Ya gotta wake up. Ya gotta help me here.” Tango stumbled under the weight of the Avian-Humanoid as he pulled him along. After fifteen years of stasis, Tango wondered if he’d ever be able to wake up.
They made it back to the airlock decontamination chamber, where Tango let the god flop against the wall for a bit to take some of the weight off himself.
Once they were out of the engine, Tango stripped off the radiation suit, shoved it into the containment closet, and grabbed the towels he had waiting. He started drying off the god as best he could, knowing those white shorts would be damp for a while because he was not about to touch a private area. He just wrapped a towel around the god’s waist and called it good on that segment for now.
He’d just barely pressed the other towel to the yellow feathers when the god gasped deeply, eyes flying open.
He screamed upon seeing Tango.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hey! It’s okay!” Tango said, covering the god’s mouth with the towel to muffle the sound before they got caught. “I know you know this language. I heard you speaking it. I’m not gonna hurt you. I just broke you out of the stasis chamber. I’m trying to save you.”
The god’s eyes were hazel. Not quite brown, not quite green. They were wide as they stared down at Tango.
“My name is Lieutenant Tek. Or, well, actually. Tango. My name is Tango. What’s your name?”
The god stared. Tango slowly lowered the towel when he figured the god wasn’t going to scream at him. “J… Jimmy.” His voice was hoarse. “That’s the name from your language they gave me when I came aboard. Before they put me in…” He shuddered. Fluid was flung from his feathers from the force of it.
Tango nodded. “Jimmy. Hi,” he greeted. “We need to get you off the ship. We’re currently docked at a space station and I just barely sent a transmission to my guild tendering my resignation of commission effective immediately. So we have to get out of here.”
Jimmy looked him up and down. “You’re… human, right?”
Tango turned his head to show his pointed ears. “Mostly. I’m technically a hybrid though. My grandfather wasn’t human. I don’t know if you’d know his planet or species or anything. I’m mostly human with just enough alien in me to be a little bit sturdier and have these ears and the red eyes.”
“But you need oxygen.”
“Among other things. Yeah.”
Jimmy nodded. “O… okay. Yeah… yeah. Let…” His hands landed on Tango’s shoulders. “Hold onto me.”
“What?”
“Now.”
Tango followed orders, hugging Jimmy around the middle.
Jimmy’s wings began to glow, each feather outlining with gold light.
They swept around Tango.
Reality seemed to bend and stretch. In an attempt not to retch, Tango buried his face into Jimmy’s damp chest and squeezed his eyes shut.
He had no idea how, but he felt reality snap around them.
“O… open your eyes, Tango,” Jimmy said.
Tango lifted his head. Slowly, he peeled his eyes open.
They were standing on a planet. Lush with life. Colorful. Bright sunlight, breathable air.
Tango blinked. “Where… where are we?”
“Don’t recognize it?”
“No…?”
“We’re on Earth,” Jimmy said. “That ship was supposed to bring me here as a refugee but as an emissary for Bia, too. I was on my way here to speak to your leaders.” His wings flapped, throwing more fluid off his feathers.
“Where on Earth did you put us?” Tango looked around.
“Dunno. Just warped to the planet’s surface.”
Tango dug his small communicator out of the pocket of his jumpsuit. “Hang on. Maybe I can get a signal here,” he muttered.
“Tango… how long was I in there? I don’t recognize you. I was on that ship for a month before they put me in that tube.”
Tango took a deep breath. “Fifteen years, give or take a few months,” he said.
Jimmy’s wings flared with light. “What?!”
Tango nodded. “Yep. And I just risked my entire career to get you out. I might never be able to work on a starship ever again after this. We’ll find out.” His communicator beeped. “Oh thank God. I got a signal.” He started tapping at it, pinging his location to nearby comms. “Wow. You put us right in the middle of nowhere. Well… we’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us.”
“A walk?” Jimmy asked, fluffing his wings.
“Skippy, I can’t fly.”
“I’ll carry you. And it’s Jimmy, not Skippy.”
“I know. It’s a nickn… I just… never mind. Fine. If you wanna carry me, you can. The nearest civilization is about a hundred miles that way.” He pointed west.
Jimmy scooped him up and ruffled his wings. “Hold on tight. I fly fast.”
“Uh… okay? WHOA!”
Jimmy surged into the air with a blast of wind. Tango clung to his neck and buried his face in his own arm to hide his eyes.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Jimmy asked.
“Not really. But you’re moving fast and I don’t really want to watch my inevitable splatification.”
“Your what?”
“Never mind.”
“Does everyone talk like that, now? After fifteen years?”
“No, I’m just weird.” Tango kept his face buried as the wind ripped through his hair.
They flew in silence for a bit, Jimmy concentrating on keeping them airborne. While still clearly taking rapture in being in the sunlight again.
“So, what now?” Jimmy asked. “Once we get to civilization?”
“We get you some clothes, get on a transport to the space port city, I take you to the leaders of the space organization I just quit to present them what the captain did to you without consent.”
“Then what’ll happen?”
“Hopefully my captain gets court martialed and never sits in a command chair ever again.”
“And what about me? And you?”
“You will be free to live your life. And I… I’ll figure something out.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, like I said, after breaking you out, I might not ever be allowed on a starship again. I might have to find something new to do with my time. Only one way to find out.”
“I… hope it… works out for you.”
“Thank you. Me too.”
—
The door to the house opened. “Tango! I’m home!” Jimmy shouted.
Clattering from down in the basement workshop made Jimmy chuckle. He tucked his wings in close and trotted down the stairs.
“Tango?”
Tango emerged from the giant metal thing he was working on, soot smudged on his face and a wire caught on his pointy ear. “Jimmy! Welcome home!” He scrambled to get out from his contraption and trotted over. “How was your day?”
“Good.” Jimmy wrapped his arms around Tango, burying his nose in Tango’s hair. It smelled like dust and smoke and grease. “The others are asking when they get to meet you.” A glimmer of light traveled down Jimmy’s feathers.
“Oh. Uh… I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? It’s been a year.”
“I’m just…” Tango shook his head. “Different from all of them.”
“Yes. And my family and friends are eager to see what it is about you that I liked so much that I brought you all the way home to Bia and am working on making sure you can sustain yourself on a planet where nothing really eats except you.”
“Totally not because I’m the guy who dragged your unconscious body out of a stasis chamber after fifteen years of nonconsensual imprisonment or anything like that.”
Jimmy pinched Tango’s chin. “Hey,” he protested, making Tango look up at him. He was at least half-a-head taller. “I didn’t start falling for you until after that whole disaster was wrapped up. I was grateful to have someone smart and caring on my side, but I didn’t realize I was falling in love with you until you suggested coming home to Bia with me.” He brushed his fingers down the side of Tango’s face. “You gave up your whole career…”
“And I’m making myself be fine with it,” Tango replied blithely. “I have you and we’ve made a home. So the fact that I’m not some hotshot starship engineer anymore could be worse. I still get to make things. This water vaporator is almost working, by the way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the whatchamacallit he was working on. “I have a few tweaks to make but give me just another day or two and we can harvest water directly from the air without needing to wait for rain.”
“O-oh. I thought you were making something dangerous.”
Tango laughed. “No! Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. Just… seems like something you’d do. Get bored and wonder if you could build a bomb out of scraps or something.”
Tango kept laughing. “Nope. This is to make it easier to keep our garden.”
Jimmy brushed his fingers down Tango’s cheek again. “You’re incredible, you know that?”
“Says the guy who’s considered a god.”
“I mean it, Tango. You impress me all the time. I couldn’t do any of the things you do.”
“I could teach you.”
“You could, but just because you could teach doesn’t mean I could learn. Everything you do seems so complicated.”
Tango shrugged. “Easy to me. Always has been. There’s a logic to how things work. Once you get it, the patterns are easy. And recreating and adapting to what I want isn’t difficult.”
“It’s beyond me,” Jimmy said with a shrug. A glimmer passed down his feathers. “Do I get to introduce you to my friends and family or not? I want them to finally properly meet the man who saved my life and let me finally come home.”
Tango was quiet for a few heartbeats. “They’re not gonna laugh at me for being an Earthling, are they?”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay. I’ll meet your friends and family.”
Jimmy gasped delightedly. “Yay!” He gave Tango’s hair a kiss. “Mwah! I’m gonna go let them know!” He gave Tango a longer kiss on the mouth before letting Tango go and scampering back out of the house, taking to the air.